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A Tesla employee in the tent they had at the event said it is still going to be a few weeks until the design studio is completed for the Model S. They also said that the first few hundred Signature series holders will likely have to lock in options before a test drive is possible.

Several people mentioned that some Tesla reps indicated the design studio would be done about two weeks after the X unveil. Well it is two weeks. Anyone have updates on when the design studio will be open?

Nope. The timeframes that Tesla reps give are, in general, fairly vague and merely in the ballpark. Winter officially ends March 20 so, "Coming this winter" (as the current studio says) will still be valid for the next 3 weeks or so!

I have an idea of my desired options, but the disabled "Packages" section in the Design Studio makes me wonder if some of the options can be bundled at a lower price.

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I doubt that'll happen. Tesla's calling their option bundles "Packages" - Tech Package, Sound Studio Package - so, I think that's what you'd end up seeing in the redesigned design studio. We can wish but, I think the pricing/options, as published, is a done deal - it's merely a matter of the design studio reflecting them.

On the other hand, if they had all of the information ready and available, why wouldn't they have just opened up the Design Studio long ago? I also am given hope by the fact that there are zero pics of the interior in the gallery. I think there is reason to believe that there are still some (minor) surprises to come. As someone who doesn't love the interior, I hope I'm right.

On the other hand, if they had all of the information ready and available, why wouldn't they have just opened up the Design Studio long ago? I also am given hope by the fact that there are zero pics of the interior in the gallery. I think there is reason to believe that there are still some (minor) surprises to come. As someone who doesn't love the interior, I hope I'm right.

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My belief is that the handful of (web) developers that they have, have been hard at work on the studio - you might recall from other threads on the X unveil event that the same developers had been busy building that "range estimator" tool for the Model S given various inputs (this is not on the website yet but, will atleast be available in Tesla stores soon).

Also, it's not easy (yet) to get a really good car design studio ready entirely in HTML5 (Tesla's particular about sticking to this) given lack of good dev tools there vs doing it in Flash (pretty much all major automakers do it in Flash).

Sorry for being a downer but, I think it simply has to do with limited development resources at Tesla...

Meta

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